The iPods I have (4 of them) have never cost me more than $20. I bought 3 broken ones, and my sister gave me her old one. One of them I had to replace the screen on ($10), another I had to re-solder a switch (free), and another I bought to hack. The two Nanos I got were $3.25 each on Ebay, and around $12 total with shipping. I wouldn't spend what Apple wants for them new as to me it seems like a ridiculous amount of cash for an MP3 player, no matter how cool it is.
Anyhow, the only one I can seem to find with a front USB is from JVC. THe USB is nice because weather you have the flash drive or the MP3 player, it will still work with it. It also lets you charge the battery in the MP3 player as you use it.
Another cool option I have thought about is an onboard hard drive mounted in the truck somewhere. Then, you don't need to have any prerecorded media in the car with you other than when you load the HD. Unfortunately, budgetary constraints keep me from doing this sort of thing-for now. In a few years it will probably be common and cheap.
Then again ( continuing on this brainstorm), if you got a large capacity microdrive or CF card, and a USB connected reader, could you not run it off the back of the radio from the USB cable? That would allow you somewhere north of 20gb of storage for around $100 if you shop around on Ebay. All you'd have to do is load it using a laptop or even a desktop before installing it. You could use an old iPod Mini as the reader (It uses CFII format microdrives), so long as the motherboard and cord were there. The clickwheel, screen and battery would not need to be any good so long as you could read it as a set of directories on the head unit's front screen. It could be hidden in the dash somewhere, and connected using a generic iPod to USB sync cable. This should work with other "broken" MP3 players too so long as the head unit is capable of reading and navigating the player's file format. Sorry if none of this works, but I just thought of this while I was typing this post.
Anyhow, the only one I can seem to find with a front USB is from JVC. THe USB is nice because weather you have the flash drive or the MP3 player, it will still work with it. It also lets you charge the battery in the MP3 player as you use it.
Another cool option I have thought about is an onboard hard drive mounted in the truck somewhere. Then, you don't need to have any prerecorded media in the car with you other than when you load the HD. Unfortunately, budgetary constraints keep me from doing this sort of thing-for now. In a few years it will probably be common and cheap.
Then again ( continuing on this brainstorm), if you got a large capacity microdrive or CF card, and a USB connected reader, could you not run it off the back of the radio from the USB cable? That would allow you somewhere north of 20gb of storage for around $100 if you shop around on Ebay. All you'd have to do is load it using a laptop or even a desktop before installing it. You could use an old iPod Mini as the reader (It uses CFII format microdrives), so long as the motherboard and cord were there. The clickwheel, screen and battery would not need to be any good so long as you could read it as a set of directories on the head unit's front screen. It could be hidden in the dash somewhere, and connected using a generic iPod to USB sync cable. This should work with other "broken" MP3 players too so long as the head unit is capable of reading and navigating the player's file format. Sorry if none of this works, but I just thought of this while I was typing this post.
